


in the dark i have no name

by irishais



Category: Final Fantasy XV, Kingsglaive: Final Fantasy XV
Genre: And then this happened, F/M, Modern AU, me: hm glauca's armor kind of reminds me of venom, me: watches kingsglaive, parasite au, symbiote au
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-09-13
Updated: 2020-09-13
Packaged: 2021-03-06 22:53:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,691
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26446651
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/irishais/pseuds/irishais
Summary: When the security alarm goes off at Imperial Magitek Works, Detectives Altius and Drautos are dispatched to apprehend a criminal, but before Titus Drautos can stop it, something much more malevolent makes a home within him. Parasitic!Glauca modern AU. Eventual Drautos/Crowe.
Relationships: Titus Drautos/Crowe Altius
Comments: 1
Kudos: 2





	in the dark i have no name

Sirens scream through the night, and the alarm hasn’t stopped since they crossed the threshold of Imperial Magitek Works. 

One of those sounds is gonna have to quit, Titus Drautos thinks, otherwise they’re not going to be able to hear anything at all. 

A hazard in their line of work, especially when a footstep or a cough can give away the location of a perp. He turns back to the officers covering the front door, makes a  _ shut up  _ gesture across his throat. The sirens cease, but it does nothing for the piercing alarm, and even less for the headache that’s already beating the inside of his skull-- more from the couple of glasses of Kenny C’s finest mid-shelf whiskey than any invasive noise, though, he’ll have to admit. 

_ What the hell happened to having a night off, for once? _

They’ll have to work with what they have, though, he supposes. His partner rolls her eyes, but Crowe Altius’ stance never falters as she does a sweep of the lobby. 

There’s a reception desk, and draped across it is the body of the night guard, laid out overtop the Sunday crossword. _ Little late in the day, isn’t it?  _ Titus pauses long enough to check the guy’s absent pulse through two layers of latex glove squeezed between three other fingers. There’s nothing, save for a sticky patch of blood that he folds to the inside of the glove before stuffing it back in his pockets. It doesn’t matter; the exit wound on the back of the guy’s skull and gray matter sprayed all over the chrome logo on the wall behind him tells all he needs to know. 

“IPD! Show yourself!” It doesn’t matter how loudly he bellows it, voice echoing through the open center of the cavernous lobby, bouncing up and off floors that seem to stretch on forever-- if the alarm didn’t give away their immediate presence, the sirens screaming through Insomnia’s nonexistent late-night traffic certainly would have. 

He approaches the elevator-- its indicator panel reads floor 38. 

“Let’s take a ride,” he says to Crowe, and radios for someone to cover any other stairwells. 

It an uneventful ascent up thirty-eight floors, and their arrival is greeted with only the persistent yell of the alarm, a sound that only seems to get louder the further down the hall they get. Louder, and different, as if there’s a secondary tone beneath the first. Eventually, it reaches crescendo as they approach a wide open frame that, judging from the scatter of glass across gray carpet, once held an actual window. 

He checks Crowe out of reflex, nods, points with two fingers. 

They move in tandem, practiced and swift, silent save for another announcement of their presence that covers their asses for all that might follow-- Crowe stays low, because there’s no way for Drautos to stay anything but high, built as he is. The bulletproof vest helps, some. He knows he’s hard to miss, especially when a scared-shitless perp with a loaded weapon has a target that big to hit; but he barely notices the extra weight as they step through the empty that stretches from floor to ceiling. 

“Drautos.” Crowe’s dark ponytail jerks with the swift node of her head at a door marked AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY in precise black paint. Through the inset window, he can see the red flares of light and the continual  _ whump  _ of a secondary alarm that doesn’t quite match up with the scream of the first one, a sound that can only mean  _ emergency _ , or  _ we’re fucked _ , depending on what’s beyond that door. 

But they can’t afford to wait and find out. 

Another nod to Crowe, who watches their backs while he slams a heavy steel-toed boot into the space just beneath the lock. It only takes one attempt, the cheap door splintering upon impact. He would’ve expected more for how outwardly fancy the whole place seems to be, but that’s the corporate world for you. Everything is cheap dressed up in a decent coat of paint. 

Later, he’ll wonder why the door was so easily broken, considering, but for now, Drautos sweeps the room, flashlight over gun, textbook. 

It’s anticlimactic, the red lights bathing an otherwise ordinary-looking office, save for the fact that it looks like it was abandoned midday instead of at quitting time, like someone pulled the fire alarm and the whole place emptied out without worrying about what was left on their calendar for the day. Weird. 

Crowe points left, toward a secondary door. A nod from him, and she moves the remaining dozen feet between a messy desk with a half-full cup of coffee still sitting on the corner of the desk, still warm when he brushes his knuckles against it in passing.

“Still here, maybe,” he murmurs. “Coffee’s still hot.” 

“Unlocked,” she mouths in return, fingers testing the lever on the second door, and slides into the new room on silent feet. Behind her, slightly to the left, covering her blind spot, guns drawn, guns up, lights tearing apart all the shadows they can see. 

Nothing; the lab’s empty.

“Clear,” he calls over his shoulder, right side full of more desks and scientific equipment and a white board that’s covered in complex formulas that just hurt his head even more to try and decipher. They’ll leave that to the brains of the department to figure out, or their perp, depending. 

“Altius-- you clear?” he asks over his shoulder, when it’s been a second without acknowledgement or response. 

“Yeah. What in the hell...” Crowe’s voice is low, but he doesn’t miss the interest in it, and Titus turns toward her. 

What the hell, indeed. 

The lab might be empty, save for the eerie blue glow that emanates from three large tanks, two streaked through with silvery black. Like liquid mercury, he thinks, watching one of the streaks race and dance through its tank, as if their presence aggravates it.

“That thing looks pissed,” Crowe comments. He’s inclined to agree with her, but something moves out of the corner of his eye, a shadow behind a bank of monitors moving enough to yank his attention away from the tanks, catching a glimpse of an old, scruffy guy in a white coat with something clutched tight in his hands, something metal like the thermos he sometimes brings his coffee to work in.

Titus is after him like a shot, all those years of college football and decades chasing bad guys keeping his pace strong and steady. “ _ Stop!”  _ he demands, but the guy is  _ fast _ , and reaches the railing that surrounds the edge of the hall, the central lobby far below. 

It’s enough of a panicked pause that he can close the distance between them, gun aimed steadily as he slows, only a few feet of floor (and many, many feet of oval hall going in either direction, and no idea of where the staircase is or how fast the elevator doors will open if this guy gets to the button first.)

He’s banking on intimidation, and the gun, to get this guy to see reason. 

“You’ve got nowhere to go,” Drautos says. “Drop whatever’s in your hands, and put ‘em in the air.”

“I can’t-- you can’t, you shouldn’t--” There’s no show of following any instructions, even as the man can’t get a complete sentence out in his fear. And that is what it is, Titus realizes, terror, Lab Coat’s wrinkled, spotted face almost gray beneath the pinning glow of his flashlight. 

In his arms, there’s a big steel container, with little holes like the windows on a ship. Within the portholes, there’s a streak of that silvery stuff. 

“I don’t want to hurt you, sir, I just want some answers. C’mon. Put the stuff down, and we’ll talk about what I can’t or shouldn’t do, okay? What’s your name?” Deescalate. Gun doesn’t move. 

“Verstael Besithia-- you don’t want to be here, you should let me go, let me destroy this before they realize it’s gone-- the project didn’t  _ work _ , the project’s going to kill us all--”

“Project? What  _ project?  _ Listen, Mr. Besithia, c’mere, come away from the railing, let’s talk--” 

He doesn’t get a chance to finish the sentence, because it’s as if he put the idea in Besithia's head, that there’s only one way out of this, with how fast the man’s expression changes, and how quick he is to turn, scrambling over the top rail that separates him from certain death.

“ _ Don’t-- _ ” 

But it’s too late, his feet don’t move fast  _ enough _ , and all Drautos manages to get a handful of is the side handle of the steel container, sees the panic in Verstael’s eyes even as he’s falling, as their fingers scrabble briefly for control.

Something beneath Titus’ hand clicks open, a sharp hiss of cold coating his palm, colder than Gralean winter. 

It’s enough of a shock that he jerks away his hand, giving up control of their one shred of evidence that they might be able to salvage in surprise, container following the scientist down, down, down--

The silvery stuff escapes in a flash, scrambling like a streak of moonlight up Titus’ arm, and he opens his mouth to yell for Crowe, for backup, for _something_ \--

It is on his tongue, down his throat, freezing as it goes. He claws at his neck as Verstael Besithia becomes a corpse thirty-eight stories down, surrounded by Insomnia PD’s finest, the steel container a dented secondary casualty, spilling nothing but chlorinated water in a puddle, no hint of what was once inside. 

( _ because it is gone, it is inside him, it is binding itself to his cells and his nerves and his bones, it burrows beneath his atoms to make a comfortable home of its host, and yes, yes, this will do so very nicely, it thinks, but the heart is racing too fast to follow the beat, and it snakes a tendril up into the brain, pulling on a cluster of neural networks like pulling the string of an old lamp. nighty-night.) _

Titus Drautos, who has never before in his life fainted from anything, drops like a stone. 


End file.
